What is the Knowledge Society? Marin Dinu Ph.D. Professor Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest Abstract. This study sets out to establish conceptual delimitations, more concordant to the theoretical acquisitions with regard to the knowledge society. The author considers it opportune to situate in the center of the definition of the concept of knowledge society the problem of prevalence in the typology of resources. Thus, the knowledge society appears as a form of organization in which scientific knowledge predominates, be that informatics as well. The concordances of essence are discovered through the discerning of the functional relationship knowledge society – global society. In the spectrum of meanings specific to this highway of post-postmodernist configuration of the world, the priorities of the project of the second modernity – the paradigmatic matrix of globalization – are approached. In fact, the study argues in favor of refocusing globalization on the humane, on its distinctive values which substantiate and lend sense to the evolutions of the world. Postreferentiality is the rational expression of humanity coming back to itself(1). Key words: the principle of critical mass; postreferentiality; the second modernity; the substance of globalization. JEL Classification: D83, O33. A postreferential perspective on resources The real problem of the knowledge based society is The first referential: the explicative model meta-knowledge. The basis for this statement resides in When we talk about the knowledge society, in its the performance of actional routine of avoiding an entropic various linguistic approximations, we are referring to the risk: the re-invention of the wheel. This is how the world state of grace of people as beings whose creativity combines must always come back to the need for formulating an reason with passion, calculus with inspiration, deduction asymptotic answer to the recurrent problem: how to favor with induction, logical reasoning with metaphysical development by increasingly using what knowledge is? appreciation, the contingent or the substance with What is the Knowledge Society? Knowledge the is What 45 transcendence or the immaterial, the value of truth with because the conceptual universe of the knowledge society conjecture etc. In a natural way, an incremental perception must be completely detached from the transcendental gathers shape: the knowledge society is just the post- model of society which has always counted – especially Cartesian human society, when creativity aims for the implicitly – on knowledge, and it has even given the undetermined completeness. positivistic impression that it has progressed only as a result The bare identification of this change in the public of the constantly refined capacity of using the conscience must not get us worried. It is, anyhow, instrumentalization of the values of knowledge in general. conforming to a limitative tradition, that of the comfort of Certainly, without vigor and commonly, human society the conservation of the frame of reference at the level of is a society of knowledge; of knowing the mechanisms for what was inculcated in each person’s spiritual universe the use of limited resources, which are by definition natural. through the channels of general knowledge. The reflex of Generally, society has always been a knowledge society, Theoretical and Applied Economics Applied and Theoretical resorting to the mechanic model of describing the world but which has sought new knowledge meant to exclusively and – eventually – of anything belonging to it, is the consume mother-nature. The real knowledge society – as constituting invariable of today’s spirituality. an expression of the global society – tries to reconcile the We are still not out of – unless by exception and needs of human nature, ever larger and diverse, with those somewhat exclusively elitist – the paradigm of the clock- of the regeneration of mother-nature, by proposing ways universe (Damasio, 2004). We explain to ourselves, self- of development which consume the inexhaustible sufficiently, that anything represents a cog in a contraption resources, above all the resource represented by human powered by the mechanical force of the extending spring. intelligence, by knowledge, the propensity to innovate, If even the visible universe seems to imitate the regularities the entrepreneurial capacity, the creative associateship etc. of a pendulum, then we can construct and reconstruct any It may be that some fundaments of the strategies for organism, be it alive or not! knowledge society could have inadequate motivations, of The obsession for the mechanism, thoroughly installed the type that concentrate on the need for competition, as in our way of perceiving the world, has culminated with an expression of the exploitation of the competitive industrialism and the specialization of professional function (Groupe de Lisbonne, 1995). As others seem to thinking. Scissiparity and division have become the rule, simply fail in utopism, especially where there is no capacity the model for a savant covers ultra-specialization to the of generating or benefiting from the resources, such as a smallest possible particle of matter, the vocation of the Romanian attempt of orchestrating a durable development schools of thought was squandered in the discovery of project with a year 2025 horizon. Beyond these extremes, universal constants, excellence was achieved in the there are enough experiences which can generate a data fragmentary profession, the part, the minute, making the fund for a credible strategy of evolution toward the whole uninteresting to research. knowledge society. The signs of evolution though point to a comeback, on Between the quality of progressing through knowledge, a different level, towards the preeminence of the functional which the human society had, and the model of the whole, be that a self-regulating system or a self-organizing knowledge society there is a difference of critical mass. one, a tendency relating to the transformation of knowledge When society arrives at diligently producing knowledge into the essential resource of existence. It can be an and preponderantly consuming knowledge, then it really immanent tendency of the living world of attaining the becomes the knowledge society. Now, knowledge is functional completeness, but also a sought after alternative effectively pluri- and trans-discipline to the point of to the propensity of the individualization of the state of paradigmatic fusions, concrete to the point of consciousness which shields the perspective of the whole. scientification and immaterial to the point of virtuality. In The exercise of redesigning the vision is somewhat vital the knowledge society, the idea, as an information, is not for overcoming the bottleneck of understanding the just primordial, but has priority, while it manifests itself unsolved problems which crowd the highway of knowledge both as ineffable and substantial, essential and concrete, due to the precarious method of caeteris paribus. functional and efficient. It must be pointed out that the paradigmatic reasoning of the knowledge society – as a notion generating The second referential: the global society directions, instruments, attitudes and practices, a human As a resource of development, knowledge transforms actional field different in history – needs, after the triumph into inexhaustible power, whose administration can only of mechanics, extremely nuanced explanations. And this be done globally in order not to become its opposite. The 46 frequent associating of globalization with the knowledge confiscate goods, especially ideas, but in general the society in the professionalized discourse is both opportune knowledge society will create the favorable environment and justified. Frankly speaking, globalization has for for well done things. The changes of conscience – in a finality the global society, which can be consistently positive sense, affect not just every individual and identified in the spectrum of meanings of the knowledge community in particular, but humankind as a whole. The society, from the centering of development on innovation world will be, obviously not at once at everywhere, to the comfortable mobility of factors and the fulfillment responsible in regard to its insertion in the global system. of liberties through self-assumed standardized discernment. It seems like an excess in optimism, although I believe The evolutions toward the global society – as a that, in reality, the evolution of the knowledge society, as definitive expression of globalization –, even if they seem any other formula for a post-ideological society, is stalled theological, especially through the accepted logistics for by an excess of hereditary conservatism which refuses the objectives of the knowledge based society in some renewal de facto because it ruins habits. parts of the globe such as the European Union, are not If we take into account that the categorical practices in either linear or predetermined. The knowledge society bears the administration of the economy about to globalize, indeterminations which relate only to the substance of deviant with regard to the essence of globalization, marked knowledge, unprogrammable in essence in impossible to by the hegemony of a part which controls all the other parts incase in the framework of a paradigm without the risk of of the global whole and which discretionarily administrates not founding failed projects or of administrating a global